La Dulce Cinema

by Lisa Garibay
Independent Feature Project
February 1999

Why Sugartown collaborators Allison Anders and Kurt Voss turned their lens on Hollywood. Interview by Lisa Y.C. Garibay

Allison Anders and Kurt Voss have collaborated through life as much as through their films. The two have been creative partners since they met during the early days of film school. A mutual love for music has propelled their efforts from the start. Their first co-written, co-directed feature, Border Radio, documented the burgeoning L.A. punk scene. With Sugartown, the pair have come back to their roots, lured by the stories of music and musicians which first inspired their work.

Sugartown's power, however, has less to do with the flashy faces and glamorous histories of the rock legends who appear in it -John Taylor (former bassist, Duran Duran), Martin Kemp (former drummer, Spandau Ballet), Michael Des Barres (of the 70's band Silverhead and who has also worked with Kiss and Power Station) and John Doe (co-founder of the seminal punk band X). Instead, Sugartown conveys the humanity behind rock icons and other celebrities that we idolize. Through Anders' and Voss' lifelong devotion to music and its creators, their film puts music fans and Superstars on the same level by conveying stories of disappointment, redemption, love, and the surprises in life that no one, no matter how wealthy or successful, can prepare for. The film also stars Rosanna Arquette, Ally Sheedy, Jade Gordon, Richmond Arquette, Lucinda Jenny, Larry Klein, and Beverly D'Angelo. Sugartown, a USA Film Release, is now playing in theaters.

Allison, what kind of role did you see yourself playing in the world of music when you were growing up: fan, groupie or fanatic?

Anders: I was never a groupie…not that I don't regret that now. I went to Rock Circus, this wax museum in London, with my daughter and we took hilarious pictures of us posing with the figures of all these rock stars. While I was there, I was like, God, I can't believe I never fucked Jimi Hendrix! What the hell was I thinking?! There were all these opportunities to sleep with these rock stars… (laughs) I went to shows, though mostly in the seventies and eighties-I missed everything in the sixties. I basically went to about three or four concerts and it is just heartbreaking to me that I didn't go to more. The opportunities I missed! When I saw Velvet Goldmine I was really bummed. I was like, "Why did I never do an orgy? People don't do that now. You know, an orgy in your forties is really gross but when your bodies are young and beautiful... (laughs)

So many rock & roll films depict the woman as either the clingy groupie or some sort of overbearing rock &roll wife. Either way the female is portrayed as the infiltrator of the boys club, and that rock & roll is all about the boys - "this is our little secret society and women can only belong in these certain places." But in your films, it's the women who inspire the music, write the music, bring it to these men or lead them to do what it is that they're doing. How intentional is this-is it on your mind when you're writing these stories?

Anders: I'm just flashing on Border Radio now because in a way we had the wife at the center. She was like a rock critic in a way, but there was a certain level at which we made her stronger than the boys. The boys looked like idiots, living out some kind of rock and roll persona and just being ridiculous.

Voss: But she was a little bit of a shrew, actually, like you talk about. But the guys were all such dumbbells that she kind of needed to get in there with a rolling pin and (motions whacking someone on the head).

Anders: Yeah, exactly!

Voss: I don't mean to answer her question for you, but I don't think [Allison] thinks polemically like, "I want to say this about women." I think it just comes out of who you are.

Anders: Yeah. Grace of My Heart is funny because that was something that even in film school I was interested in, those songwriters at the Brill Building. But I had since thought a lot about that whole singer-songwriter era and how the girl group stuff was actually very strong. That led into the singer-songwriter period. The girl groups had sort of advice songs to other women - they were kind of like, "Stay away from this boy, he's no good..."

It's kind of back to that now. It disappeared for a very long time during the singer-songwriter period because then women like Joni Mitchell were doing intense work like Blue, connecting on a much different level. It wasn't just like, "Don't let him kiss you, he's this, he's that..." Or, the Shangri La's had crazy songs, usually written by Ellie Greenwich [of the Brill Building Pop factory]. Just off the wall kinds of things - "I can never go home anymore" or a girl sacrificing her mother for being in love with this boy and her mother dying... She runs off and finds the boy really disappointing and wants to go back home but the mom's dead. So it's like, this is intense shit!

When the singer-songwriter period came, women were saying stuff that men could relate to as well. It wasn't directed specifically at a female audience because those women were trying to become equals and were in fact equals to their male peers. Although there is what Joni Mitchell said in terms of Kris Kristofferson - her male peers were really, really embarrassed by Blue because it was so personal. Kris was saying, "Joni, you should keep some of that to yourself." But yet, as Kurt had told me, Led Zepplin, said that Court & Spark [Joni Mitchell, 1974] was their favorite record.

Voss: Oh yeah. Elvis and Joni Mitchell were the two people Led Zepplin most wanted to meet and were most awed by. In fact, when they met Joni Mitchell, Page and Plant were too nervous to talk with her.

Anders: Isn't that so amazing? All of that has changed but now the R&B girls have brought it back recently-the advice to women thing. With Grace of My Heart, it was like following that journey: from writing advice songs to God Give Me Strength and deeper stuff like that.

Beverly D'Angelo stated that she committed to the film even before seeing the script because of the strength of your female characters. Why do you think more women writers have the problem of falling into the Hollywood trap and presenting female characters as a stereotype?

Anders: You know I'm going to say something really harsh because I think about this a lot. For one thing, Hollywood will always prefer-and this means studio Hollywood and independent Hollywood- they prefer their female characters by men. They just do. They went ape-shit over Living Out Loud, you know, just for presenting women as recognizable human beings, and they go completely crazy when some guy gets a female character reasonably right. And I have to say most actresses would rather sign up for a guy any day than be at the hands of a woman director. They're used to the dynamic of the male director-flirting or seducing them into doing the picture and going, "We were made to make this movie together," and all that shit that goes with it. (to Voss) Don't you think?

Voss: Yeah, that's probably so. But, you know, your sex is to blame for that.

Anders: I think so, too.

Voss: I mean there's a sort of competition between women so often --

Anders: Yeah, and they don't know how to please the woman. They know how to please the man.

Voss: Yeah, men are very easy. (laughs) But likewise, maybe what these actresses get back might be more complicated-they don't get the usual feedback from a female director that they're used to. It's going to be an obviously different relationship all the way down the line.

Anders: Totally. I also think that critics-men and women-are harder on women directors. And I don't think that actresses sign up to do women's projects as readily as they'd do a much more mediocre character for a male director. Hollywood in general would just be so much happier if they just had good strong female characters written and directed by men.

Voss: Maybe it's true that women are held to a higher critical standard or something.

Anders: Oh absolutely! I mean I will tell you that I am so happy now. When we were at Sheffield Studios, people were referring to me as a rock filmmaker instead of a woman filmmaker. And I was like, Oh God, please let that stick, please let that stick. The idea of being in that ghetto is just... Also because I'm working with Kurt, they can't just say that it's a woman's film. He's also responsible for a lot of the strengths of these women characters, too, whether he would want to admit that or not. He's in touch with his feminine side.

How crucial is music during the creative process - story development, writing, shooting?

Voss: We had the stereo going while we wrote this time, though I would say it was a little less --

Anders: Not as much as Border Radio.

Voss: Because you're in a room with someone else to talk to. The thing about writing, I've been thinking about recently, is it's just so goddamn lonely sometimes, you know?

Anders: It's just awful, isn't it?

Voss: And it's even worse when good things happen for you in your career and you get another job -- you think, this is my reward? I have to go back in that room?!

Anders: Exactly!

Voss: So music has been important in writing to me just because when you're writing, it's your friend. It becomes your company.

Anders: I usually make a soundtrack tape and that's what I write to. But with Sugartown it was really hard because all of our characters were into totally different things-there wasn't a particular sound. But we eventually went with this kind of indie soundtrack, so there's a lot of stuff from Matador, SubPop, Mute, places like that.

Voss: I know those "soundtracks," because you've given me some with scripts. They kind of describe the mindset you were in while writing it, or the vibe of the movie.

Anders: Yeah, exactly. It's the tone of the movie.

Voss: But it's not like that ends up in the final cut. It's just more for yourself to get a sense of the picture.

Anders: Exactly. With this I couldn't even do that. It was hard for us to decide, "What do we listen to now?" What were we listening to? I keep thinking we were listening to Depeche Mode but we weren't but that was the other thing…

Duran Duran?

Anders: (laughing) Ha! That was the other movie! For this, I think we played a little Gun Club.

Voss: The sound of Ruben's [Anders' son] James Bond video games is what makes me think of writing this script.

How closely do you work with the composers and songwriters for your films?

Anders: With Grace of My Heart, what I tried to do is take a song and say it had to have a certain lyrical content-it should be about a wedding and it should sound like either Chapel of Love or Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry. Larry Klein even went a step further with Jerry Goffman in that film with Born to Love That Boy. Larry told him, she wants it to sound like this, and Jerry said, oh I get it - she wants it to sound like that shit that I wrote back then, all the really crappy stuff-okay!

Many of the roles in Sugartown were written for the performers. Was there anybody that you wanted who couldn't commit and caused you to have to rewrite the character?

Anders: Only two people weren't available. We had a hard time re-casting one of them. But it's hard to imagine. Once you re-cast someone it's so hard to imagine someone else-the original person-in the part.

Voss: We were very fortunate to get a really good replacement.

You talk in the production notes about some of the motivation behind the film is thes addiction to fame and how you never get over it. How have you dealt with your own notoriety, and with watching your friends deal with it as well?

Voss: Well, I've never experienced fame… But I've watched it go to Allison's head. She spun out of control but she's come back to earth now. (laughs)

Anders: We were more interested in either people who were trying to get fame, or people who had lost it. I did this Behind The Music on VH-1 for Duran Duran-they interviewed me for that, which I was very excited about-and when I watched it, I saw John Taylor saying, "You'll spend more time trying to hang onto fame then you'll ever spend trying to get it." It is just too powerful, so intoxicating, that you really will do just about anything to hang onto it.

For us, it was more interesting to have characters watching it slip away and think, what do you do then? People who have it are not very interesting-at best, you can't get close to them, and at the worst we know they're just obnoxious assholes, people that talk endlessly about themselves. People desperately want fame to give them something back, myself included. Mine has been so small but it wasn't at all what I thought-it iss never what people think it is going to be.

People want to have it all the way. They want to have the approval and the love and the recognition and they want to be able to get a better seat in the restaurant but then they don't want to have to sign autographs at dinner. And it's like, fuck you. You just fucking called and said, I'm so-and-so, and got a better table because of it! That's bullshit: to use your fame for the perks but then feel like you don't owe the public anything. So it's stuff like that I think is interesting.

Voss: Yeah. In terms of the movie, it was the characters all getting to a point where they had to reinvent themselves and rediscover the tools.

Fill the hole with something else.

Anders: Exactly. And find out what's really grounding and really important: what real love is. In fact for me, John Taylor was always so interesting as a human being because when I first met him, he was starting to lose his [fame]. At the end of the big Duran Duran period, I met him at a concert at the Universal Amphitheater. They were signing autographs and I watched as John tried to keep humanized by asking someone their name, or just trying to be like, "I'm really just a real person." Very few people have that experience so it's very interesting to think how they stay grounded through it all.

When Princess Diana died, it was so interesting to hear all these celebrities blaming the paparazzi. Oh, you poor little celebrities, people chase you with cameras... poor little things. You talk about privacy, but who the fuck has privacy? Do they think that poor people have privacy? Everyone knows their business from next door. You can't have a fight with your spouse without everyone in your apartment building knowing. Celebrities say, "I've got to have my privacy, too." I think they're bullshit.

The more interesting people are the one's who have just lost their celebrity and then have to cope with real life. With the people that really love them and who really care about them, and who they really care about and what their worth is as a human being.

I was expecting Sugartown to be much more satirical, much more of a jaded commentary on fame and celebrity. But it was very much rooted in reality and humanity. Typically, movies portray characters of this stature so far removed from other people as if they have no problems that could even remotely relate to the common man. Were you worried about doing the same thing?

Anders: I'm glad that's what came across. It's so weird how people shoot in a way that distances you from the character. I see movies like that and I can't even watch them. All I can think is, why did they shoot this in this way? I don't know who the fuck these people are, and I can't even get close to them because of the way that they shot it.

How did you end up examining celebrity in the music world instead of film or Hollywood?

Anders: I think it just ended up with who we knew. We ended up with a lot of musicians.

Voss: We cast who we knew. I had worked with Michael Des Barres. Allison worked with John Taylor and Larry Klein.

Anders: And we both worked with John Doe.

Voss: Right, so it just seemed logical having all these musicians on our wish list to make that part of the texture of the movie. Although in the film, Ally Sheedy is a production designer and Rosanna is an actress, so we have a little bit of the film side.

Why is the film dedicated to Falco?

Anders: We love Falco.

Voss: And he's quintessentially an eighties guy.

Anders: Yeah. It was really sad. [Falco was killed in an automobile accident in early 1998 at the age of 40.] We looked at a number of people who died that year, but in the end Falco won out. I felt we had to dedicate the movie to someone, and Kurt didn't really care who. (laughing) He's probably never done a dedication in his life…

Voss: I dedicated a movie or two to you as I recall, back in my student days... (laughs)

Anders: You did! That's right.

Voss: But Falco…he was just it.